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Friday, 1 July 2016

Five most read last month were:1. EU Referendum: What Would Trotsky Do?2. Against the Corbyn Coup3. The Lexit Delusion4. A Socialist Case for Remain5. The Culmination of Toxic PoliticsJune 2016 was the month that broke politics. It almost broke the blog, too. 93,000 page views are a ridiculous number for a shoestring outfit like mine. To put it into context, the previous record was set in January when I toasted 67,000 page views. Well, there's a mass politicisation going on so why shouldn't the finest politics blog written in Stoke-on-Trent capture a slice of the action?But it has been the most awful, absurd month in modern British political history. The farce of the Battle of the Thames was followed by the awful tragedy of Jo Cox. Unfortunately, the lessons that should have been taken from that were downgraded to a quaint aspiration within days as the Brexit vote effectively destroyed all the certainties about British politics, and plunged us into the worst crisis for 60 years. Just as Suez finally rammed home that the days of Britannia ruling the waves were over, so this mess of a referendum threw up an ugliness that modern, liberal, tolerant Britain had thought long exorcised. The shock isn't just political, it's a return of the repressed.Politics therefore come to the fore this last month with posts about the left case for remaining doing well, beaten by the was-it/wasn't-it coup against Jeremy Corbyn and the attendant shit storm, and topped off with a fun bit of sectariana. No one cares what Trotsky thinks any more, though the audience figures for that particular piece suggest otherwise.